Speed puzzling isn’t an oxymoron. The sport is growing in Colorado
PALMER LAKE, Colo. — For a town with fewer than 3,000 residents, Palmer Lake’s Villa Toscana strip mall was surprisingly lively on a Monday evening. Conversation and laughter floated out of the Palmer Lake Pub on the corner, rivaled only by the buzz of activity from the puzzle store a few doors down.
Twenty-seven people sat, stood and squirmed at long fold-out plastic tables facing a large timer at the front of the store, waiting for permission to rip into the orange plastic bags in front of them.
“Ready, set, go!” The volunteer moderator shouted, starting the two-hour timer.
Orange bags flew to the floor, each revealing a 500-piece MasterPieces puzzle depicting a stained-glass scene of The Wizard of Oz.
For the next two hours, these 27 competitors — from twenty-somethings to seventy-somethings — will race to complete the puzzle as quickly as possible. This is speed puzzling, a reemerging sport with a growing number of players in Colorado.
“It’s actually a lot more intense than you would think,” speed puzzler Nicole Norstrud said. “I end up sweating all the time while I’m puzzling.”
Norstrud competes three to four times a month, often at Mind Quest Puzzles & Games in Palmer Lake. Mind Quest opened its brick and mortar location in early January, becoming the first dedicated speed puzzling venue in the state.
And yes, speed puzzling is considered a sport, at least by those who participate in it, like Karen Wells.
Wells, who lives in Monument, Colorado, co-owns Mind Quest with her business and puzzling partner, Jessica Bradley. Wells started speed puzzling four years ago. She quickly realized there weren’t many competitions offered in Colorado Springs and decided to start hosting her own. While they saved up to buy the storefront in Palmer Lake, Wells and Bradley rented a space in a church and started holding competitions last June.
As much as Mind Quest is a store, it’s also a space for people to puzzle or play games together, without necessarily having to buy something first.
“A lot of our friends who are speed puzzlers and are doing this regularly, they call it their clubhouse. Speed puzzler clubhouse. They come on Saturdays to practice speed puzzling. And a lot of parents have come in saying it's great to have a community space that's not geared toward video games or screens,” Wells said.
Wells and Bradley host three regular speed puzzling competitions — solo, pairs and team — at the store each month, along with occasional relay events, where teammates rotate between puzzles. They also host a once-monthly team event in Castle Rock and pairs event in Parker, as well as quarterly team competitions in Pueblo.
In late January, the store hosted a mini-tournament organized by SpeedPuzzling.com, a juggernaut in the speed puzzling world that hosts regular Zoom competitions with participants from around the world, as well as in-person championships in 18 states.
The mini-tournaments, like the one hosted by Mind Quest, are held synchronously at venues in 23 states, with the same puzzle and time limit. Jonathan Cluff, the founder of SpeedPuzzling.com, also helped start the USA Jigsaw Puzzle Association.
“It was a big deal to have that nationally recognized for us,” Wells said.
Wells and Bradley’s speed puzzling-centric location is unique, but competitions are common in Colorado, especially near Denver, Wells said. Missing Piece Puzzle Exchange, based in Westminster, holds frequent competitions at businesses and community spaces in the Denver metro, including Golden, Arvada and Louisville. The Nerd Store in Greeley hosts monthly team speed puzzling events, and Odell Brewing holds regular team speed puzzling competitions at its Five Points location in Denver.
Norstrud lives in Colorado Springs and has competed in speed puzzling competitions along the Front Range since she got into the sport two years ago. While she often sees some of the same people at each event, she said the community keeps growing, with new faces popping up all the time.
“It's growing in Colorado. I don't know if that's due to us or if it's just due to more people knowing about it, because once you do it once, you've eaten the fruit and you want to do it again,” Wells said.
Lauren Stewart first tasted that fruit at the SpeedPuzzling.com event in late January, where she finished in third place. She competed in both of the solo competitions Mind Quest has hosted since then, finishing first both times. Her winning time for The Wizard of Oz puzzle clocked in at 1:06:43.
Stewart, 31, discovered speed puzzling when she stumbled across a video online of someone competing at the Worlds competition. She worked her way backward from the international level of the sport to find local competitions near her. She lives about 15 minutes away from Mind Quest. She showed up to the most recent competition a few hours after her flight home from Boston.
“I thought about not coming today. It's just so much fun, I can't resist,” Stewart said.
“The community is amazing. I didn't know what to expect going into my first mini tournament. I didn't know the vibe of or the demographic of people that were going to be doing speed puzzling. Everyone has been super welcoming and nice and fun to talk to.”
Stewart starts each puzzle by sorting out the edges as she flips all the pieces over. She puts together the border first, a common approach among speed puzzlers. Some puzzlers, like Mind Quest co-owner Bradley, don’t use the reference photo at all, relying instead on the colors and textures on each piece.
Stewart’s out-the-gate success has made her highly recruitable among puzzlers looking to round out their group for team events.
Finding a partner for pairs tournaments — or a group of four for team events — can be a challenge for newbies to the sport, which is part of what makes the speed puzzling community what it is. When you can’t fall back on your existing social circle, you’re encouraged to meet someone new and connect over a shared love of the game.
“You kind of have to enter the community to find yourself a partner,” Norstrud said.
Desperate for a partner after all her friends turned her down, Norstrud connected with another woman on a Facebook puzzle swap page and asked her to partner up. They’re still puzzle partners today.
“We ourselves don't talk a lot about politics because we know we're kind of on opposite ends. But it's really nice to be able to have these relationships with people that you wouldn't agree with typically,” Norstrud said.
Some speed puzzlers, like Debbie Lombardi, prefer to only do solo competitions. Lombardi said she’s too protective of her puzzles to work on them with anyone else. She consistently participates in Mind Quest’s solo competitions and, despite working alone, has still met people through the events.
“I sit with one of them every time. We reserve a place for each other,” Lombardi said.
Lombardi, 72, competed in her first speed puzzling competition in 1986, but she didn’t pick it back up again until last summer at a Mind Quest event. At the 1986 competition, she said there were about 15 people. She was amazed to see how big the sport has gotten, with multiple event categories to compete in and more than 1,000 people participating in last year’s USA Jigsaw Nationals competition.
The 2022 USA Jigsaw Nationals marked the first formal, nationwide speed puzzling competition since the 1980s, when Athens, Ohio routinely hosted the Hallmark National Jigsaw Puzzle Championships.
The speed puzzling community is supportive, Wells said, with puzzlers genuinely congratulating the people who finish before them and offering encouragement to those who didn’t beat the timer. But the competitive edge is still there.
“I'm a pretty competitive person … being able to compete in these types of competitions kind of scratches an itch that I have,” Norstrud said.
Norstrud has always enjoyed puzzles, but before she discovered speed puzzling, she said she’d complete maybe 10 puzzles a year. Now, she does about 350 puzzles a year.
“It's definitely become more of a sport in that sense where I have a focus and I have a goal, and I'm going to train to try to hit that goal more or less,” she said.
Norstrud compares the training strategy for a speed puzzling competition as similar to training for a marathon, of which she has run three. To get faster at puzzling, you have to do a lot of puzzles. You can even do interval training: puzzling as fast as possible for a few minutes, taking a break, then puzzling again fast for the same amount of time.
Before a big competition, like Nationals at the end of March, Norstrud said she tapers, doing fewer puzzles the week before the tournament. Norstrud also does targeted back and hand exercises to prepare her body for competition.
Running used to be Norstrud’s outlet for exercise, competition and personal goal setting. Hip pain and motherhood have made getting out to run much more challenging, Norstrud, 47, said. Speed puzzling has filled that gap.
The USA Jigsaw Puzzle Association will host the 2026 Nationals tournament March 27-29 in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2024, a high schooler from Boulder won the national title in the solo event. The Colorado Speed Puzzling Championship, put on by SpeedPuzzling.com, will come to Monument on May 16. Norstrud, Wells and Bradley plan to compete in both. Stewart joined too late for Nationals this year, but she plans to compete in the state competition.
For the first time, speed puzzling will be included at the Rocky Mountain State Games in July. Mind Quest will host the competition.
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